If you’re looking for the winner in the Paranoia Derby,
I suggest the spooks at NSA who classified the Furby.
I’ve inquired about the wherefores, but the bureaucrats are balking;
They refused requests for interviews… and Furby isn’t talking.
One assumes they fear the Furby, reckless creature prone to chatter,
Overhearing something classified, and passing on the matter.
Round the children of the household the suspicions doubtless hover:
For their Furby has been sighted in their bedroom… undercover.
When they overheard the Furby say “deployment of the troops,”
Furby’s echoing what Sis said, that the boy made all the poops.
And mysterious allusions made to “weapons to Saddam,”
Were the Furby’s hash of Bobby’s plaint: what happened to my Mom?
While the NSA thinks Furby’s gonna give away the store,
All the rest of us believe the little critter’s quite a bore.
Though the biggest risk is he’ll repeat what Daddy said to Mommy,
To the spies, he is an unredeemed cold warrior and a Commie!
I assert the little guy could be the savior of our nation:
For just thirty bucks, he’d be a source of pure disinformation.
We could place him in the NSA, then dump him in the streets…
How the hell could foreign agents understand what he repeats?
And just how could evil agents make him spill the stuff he knows?
Could they threaten shoving nails up Furby’s nonexistent toes?
Or remove his ears and beak, and dump his RAM if he is mute?
Never fear, no one could torture him: he’s just so blessed… CUTE!
– Steve Bates, 1/13/1999
]]>They do have major video assets throughout Paris, but you need at least one of the burner phones involved to effectively search the data in a few hours. They would be able to ID the perps from the video, but tracking the cells requires more, and the phone calls would build the network for them.
There is some kind of disconnect with Republicans. The 9/11 attackers were almost all Saudis, and they attacked Iraq. The Paris attackers were French and Belgians, but they blame Syrians. Geographic dyslexia?
]]>What is interesting is that not one actual Syrian seems to have been involved, fake Syrian passport notwithstanding. They were all European citizens. Funny how an attack by Europeans is now being used by rabble-rousers in the United States to try to block the resettlement of refugees who are, err, *not* Europeans….
-BT
]]>They were apparently quite chatty, because after the police recovered a cell phone at the seen, they started launching raids, including the one that resulted in the death of the leader.
I have been complaining about the data overload since Total Information Awareness was proposed by Poindexter. The US doesn’t have the analysts to deal with what was collected before 9/11. We had what we needed to to defend against 9/11, but no one looked at it until after the attack.
]]>When you consider just how much data is being sucked up by whatever the French equivalent of Prism is, there’s simply no way to process it all in anything approaching real time except as a retrospective thing. So they relied on simply not doing anything unusual enough to bring them to notice, and betting that their activities would not be picked up until after it was too late. They won(?) that bet.
]]>This was a platoon level attack at best so you don’t need much ‘command & control’. Using encryption draws attention and the pros know it. Local dialects and jargon are effective at stalling realization of what you are talking about. It isn’t difficult to make things opaque to outsiders.
Steve, you are remembering the intel assault on the Furbys. NSA generated a memo banning them from all facilities, but then they held me for 2 hours while I was attempting to out-process at NSA HQ because there were dental x-rays in my medical records. They kept the x-rays, but I had to wait while they checked the films for microdots or other secret stuff.
Hipparchia, just because it hasn’t been made into a TV movie doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened. These people need to do more reading.
]]>we have it straight from the horse’s, uh, mouth – they used playstations and Xboxes!
http://ricksblog.biz/lopez-cantera-on-isis-evil-in-ways-that-have-not-been-seen-before-podcast/
and evil in ways that have not been seen before? srsly? I doubt that.
]]>Of course the intel people are going to use the Paris incident to lobby for larger budgets and more power. And water is wet. – Badtux
My initial reaction precisely. And I have no training at all in that sort of “tradecraft.” I’m not even one of those legendary “computer security experts” I keep hearing about on TV. For about a century at least, any supplier of military hardware (or more recently software) has a large lobbying contingent and enough human intel sources to feed it the necessary facts to assure its cash flow. Duh!
To the public at large, and even to some “experts,” anything that looks like it might contain, say, encryption capabilities is surely useful military hardware. I can’t help remembering the talking doll a decade or two ago which was forbidden within CIA (among other agencies) because it recorded and repeated some fragments of ambient conversation in generating its own replies. Which were utter nonsense, not coded verbal messages…
]]>There was definitely some command and control here, but it’s not likely to have been anything as sophisticated as an encryption program. More like messengers with standard tradecraft (blind drops and such), and SMS and pre-arranged code phrases. The rapidity with which the terrorist cells were identified and missing people rounded up afterwards tends to indicate that, because all the French had to do was check cell phone records for the area and identify suspicious text messages and phone calls to connect the dots. The more sophisticated you get, the more you stand out beforehand because there just aren’t many of us using the more sophisticated communications technologies, and they weren’t concerned about what happened after they blew up / shot up their victims, just with escaping detection beforehand.
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